Understanding Decisions About Foreign Policy Interventions to Save Lives

了解有关拯救生命的外交政策干预的决定

• 批准号: 1440074
• 负责人: Paul Slovic
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: Decision Science Research Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-07-15 至 2015-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1440074&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Understanding; Decisions; About; Foreign; Policy

The workshop examines, in a direct and intense way, issues of valuation, judgment, preference, and choice that have engaged humanity for centuries and, today, are at the heart of the modern intellectual enterprise known as "Behavioral Decision Theory." Two primary intellectual debates lie at the heart of this proposal. The first, involving economists, philosophers, and other students of choice, concerns the influence on decisions of expressed or stated values as compared to values that are revealed through choices. Previous research has shown that the values indicated by these two modes of assessment often differ. One explanation for such inconsistency has centered around the weighting of the various attributes or objectives of decision options and the evidence for systematic discrepancies in weighting associated with expressed and revealed preferences. In particular, we shall examine the hypothesis that objectives such as national security and economic security get relatively greater weight compared to humanitarian objectives when values are revealed through decisions as opposed to being explicitly stated. A second intellectual debate addressed by the workshop concerns how tradeoffs involving multiple dimensions of value "including such disparate concerns as lives, costs, national security, uncertainty, politics, and reputation" should be evaluated as part of difficult national policy choices. It is hard to imagine an issue that has broader significance than understanding the place of humanitarian objectives in national security decisions. Millions of lives and global security depend on these decisions. Do the political, social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian values that we assume should guide rational decision making actually exist in some coherent and consistent form? If so, what are these considered values and how do we ensure that our decisions, at the end of the day, are in accord with these values? This project addresses these vital questions within the framework of a workshop designed to clarify and address an apparent disconnect between stated humanitarian aspirations and values and subsequent lack of commensurate actions. Questions are asked of public and expert participants in a workshop setting to better understand the underlying reasons why expressed humanitarian values may collapse in the decision-making process. A second objective is to understand the thinking of decision makers with hands-on experience in decisions about whether to intervene in other countries for humanitarian reasons.

该研讨会以直接和强烈的方式探讨了价值评估，判断，偏好和选择的问题，这些问题已经涉及人类几个世纪，今天是现代知识企业的核心，被称为“行为决策理论”。“两个主要的知识辩论是这项建议的核心。第一个问题涉及经济学家、哲学家和其他研究选择的学者，它关注的是表达或陈述的价值对决策的影响，而不是通过选择揭示的价值。以前的研究表明，这两种评估模式所显示的价值往往不同。对这种不一致性的一种解释是，决策选项的各种属性或目标的权重，以及与表达偏好和显示偏好相关的权重的系统性差异的证据。特别是，我们将研究这样一个假设，即当价值观通过决定而不是明确地陈述出来时，国家安全和经济安全等目标与人道主义目标相比具有相对更大的权重。研讨会讨论的第二个智力辩论涉及如何权衡涉及多个维度的价值“包括生命，成本，国家安全，不确定性，政治和声誉等不同的关注”应该作为困难的国家政策选择的一部分进行评估。很难想象还有什么问题比理解人道主义目标在国家安全决策中的地位更重要。数百万人的生命和全球安全取决于这些决定。我们认为应该指导理性决策的政治、社会、经济、文化和人道主义价值观是否以某种连贯一致的形式存在？如果是这样的话，这些价值观是什么？我们如何确保我们的决定最终与这些价值观雅阁？该项目在一个讲习班的框架内处理这些重要问题，该讲习班旨在澄清和解决所述人道主义愿望和价值观与随后缺乏相应行动之间明显脱节的问题。在研讨会上向公众和专家与会者提出了问题，以更好地了解为什么所表达的人道主义价值观可能在决策过程中崩溃的根本原因。第二个目标是了解决策者在决定是否出于人道主义原因对其他国家进行干预时的想法。